Maxima2 is the successor of QueenMaxima and BugChess NL. The code has been completely rewritten and modernized using new developments in computer chess from the last decade.

The most notable changes are:

• 64 bits architecture with bitboards and move generation with magic bitboards.
• Using Late Move Reductions (LMR) in the search.
• Less extensions, more pruning.
• More efficient code.
• Integrated self-matching test for testing and tuning evaluation values.
• Tapered evaluation.
• Maxima is now an UCI engine.

Maxima currently only plays traditional chess. Plans are to support wild variants again soon, mainly loser's and suicide chess.

You can use Visual Studio Code to develop and debug Maxima2 by installing the Remote Development Extension and Docker.

The latest development version of Maxima 2 plays as BugChess(C) on the http://freechess.org/ chess server.

Copyright (C) 1996-2015 Erik van het Hof and Hermen Reitsma

This project is GPL'd. For complete details on our licensing please see the included "LICENSE" file.